Blaupunkt Travel Pilot DX-N

...Fiesta, delivered this month, the Blaupunkt TravelPilot comes fitted in a unit combined with the radio.
To try this system out, over a period of three weeks, and a total of about 600 miles, entirely within my home county of West Yorkshire, i ran the TravelPilot alongside my own local knowledge of the area built up over 17 years of driving around the area.

To enter a destination it is necessary to go through a menu and a series ...
...a mobile phone. There is a form of predictive texting, which can be quite useful.

The problem I found, though, was that before I could find the way to, say, Huddersfield Police Station I needed to know what road it is in. There seems to be no provision for places like hospitals or police stations as destinations.

Back to the AtoZ to get the road name.

The GPS link does try hard to locate the unit, but ... more

In our brand new Fiesta, delivered this month, the Blaupunkt TravelPilot comes fitted in a unit combined with the radio.
To try this system out, over a period of three weeks, and a total of about 600 miles, entirely within my home county of West Yorkshire, i ran the TravelPilot alongside my own local knowledge of the area built up over 17 years of driving around the area.

To enter a destination it is necessary to go through a menu and a series of entries not wholly unlike entering a text message on a mobile phone. There is a form of predictive texting, which can be quite useful.

The problem I found, though, was that before I could find the way to, say, Huddersfield Police Station I needed to know what road it is in. There seems to be no provision for places like hospitals or police stations as destinations.

Back to the AtoZ to get the road name.

The GPS link does try hard to locate the unit, but I discovered that much of the time when I was not on motorway or A roads the screen simply said 'Off Road" It seems the mapping doesn't extend to very many minor roads, which really are where I mostly want to be.

With a brand new unit I wouold have assumed that the CD software would have been up to date, but alas, when I drove onto the section of A629 which was opened in December 2003 I was told I was off road.

A journey from Pontefract to the western outskirts of Bradford, for which the M62 is the ideal main route, TravelPilot kept trying to send me through the city centres of both Leeds and Bradford, telling me to leave the motorway each time I reached a junction.

Just for good measure, it also wanted to send me along dead-ends twice and the wrong way down a very busy one-way street.

My conclusion? I'll stick to my local knowledge and the AtoZ.

Maybe folk who are not familiar with the area might find this piece of kit useful, even though it may well send them the long way round, but it has a long way to go before it will be of any use to me.

And oh, that woman shouting instructions at me; did she get on my nerves. 

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